Obama-kins and McCain-a-crats 28 February 2008

We have heard recently about the Obama-kins, the Republicans for Obama. And I would like to point out the McCain-a-crats, the Democrats who are for McCain, outnumber the Republicans for Obama by almost a two to one margin. [well, that is Rove, the oddest looking cheerleader ever born… — Mcat]

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I started looking at Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s Iraq plans, and one of the things that I discovered is that both of them intend to keep the Green Zone intact. Both of them intend to keep the current US embassy project, which is slated to be the largest embassy in the history of the world. I mean, I think it’s 500 CIA operatives alone, a thousand personnel. And they’re also going to keep open the Baghdad airport indefinitely. And what that means is that even though the rhetoric of withdrawal is everywhere in the Democratic campaign, we’re talking about a pretty substantial level of US forces and personnel remaining in Iraq indefinitely.

In the case of Barack Obama, I wanted to focus in on what his position is on private military contractors, particularly armed ones like those that work for Blackwater. And the reason I focus on Obama instead of Hillary on this is because Barack Obama has actually been at the forefront of addressing the mercenary issue in the Congress. In February of 2007—this was way before the Nisour Square massacre, where Blackwater forces killed seventeen Iraqis and wounded twenty others—in February of 2007, Barack Obama sponsored legislation in the Senate that sought to expand US law so that—

JUAN GONZALEZ: This is just after he got into the Senate, right?

JEREMY SCAHILL: This was in 2007. This was a year ago. And so, this was a major piece of legislation by Obama, and it was done in concert with Representative David Price from North Carolina in the House, a Democrat. And Obama’s legislation basically said we realize that there are loopholes in the law that allow Blackwater and other contractors to essentially get away with murder, and so what we need to do is make it so that US law applies to not only Defense Department contractors, but State Department contractors like Blackwater. If they murder someone in Iraq, we can prosecute them back in the United States.

Now, that legislation hasn’t passed at this point, and it may never pass. I mean, the fact is that the Bush administration actually issued a statement opposing that legislation, and I want to read to you what Bush said. He said that law would have, quote, “intolerable consequences for crucial and necessary national security activities and operations.”

And so, I started to look at this reality. Obama is saying he wants to keep the embassy. Obama is saying he wants to keep the Green Zone. Obama is saying he wants to keep the Baghdad airport. Who’s guarding US diplomats right now at this largest embassy in the history of the world? Well, it’s Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp; it’s these private security companies.

And so, I started talking to some of the Obama campaign people. And it really took days for them to actually get back to me and provide someone to talk to me on the record. I started doing interviews with some of his people, and they said, “We can’t answer these questions.” And so, finally I talked to a senior foreign policy person, who said, yes, the reality is that we can’t rule out, we won’t rule out, using private security forces.

And I said, well, Senator Obama has identified them as unaccountable, and the reality is, his law may not pass before he takes office, if he wins, and so Obama could potentially be using forces that he himself has identified as both unaccountable and above the law. Long pause. Right.

And so, the situation right now is that Obama seems to have painted himself into a corner on this issue, because the reality is, Obama’s people are saying, well, we’re going to increase funding to the State Department’s Diplomatic Security division. They say, ideally, the people we want to be guarding US diplomats in Iraq will be fully burdened US government employees who are accountable to US law.

But the irony right now is that the war machine is so radically privatized that there are about 1,100 mercenaries doing diplomatic security in Iraq right now. There are only 1,400 diplomatic security agents in the entire world, and only thirty-six of them are in Iraq.

And why are they so tender on the subject?, slow or unable to answer?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, let me ask you, in terms of this whole issue of mercenaries in general, I mean, are we facing the possibility that a Democratic president would in essence reduce the troops but increase the mercenaries?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Juan, this is a great question, and it was one of the reasons why I started looking at this. I want to read you a quote here. Joseph Schmitz, who’s one of the leading executives in the Blackwater empire, recently said this:

“There is a scenario where we could as a government, the United States, could pull back the military footprint, and there would then be more of a need for private contractors to go in.”

So apparently these contractors see a silver lining in that scenario. You know, the reality is, right now, that these forces are one of the most significant threats to Iraqis in the country. I mean, we’ve seen scores of incidents where they’ve shot at them, etc.

But as you know, Juan, this is a bipartisan industry. I mean, Bill Clinton really gave rise to this phenomenon of the military contractors. We know that Dick Cheney was running Halliburton in the ’90s. Who was giving Dick Cheney all of those contracts? Well, it was Bill Clinton. And the Democrats have long been good for the war contracting industry. There’s a reason why Hillary Clinton is the number one recipient of campaign contributions from the defense industry. Number two is John McCain. Obama is number four. Chris Dodd is ahead of him. It’s very interesting. It’s a bipartisan phenomenon.

As the race narrows, the funnel of MIC cash to Hillary and Dodd will shift to Obama…

Just have to chuckle. Doesn’t that just REEK of ”new politics”, so drastically different from [gasp! horror! panic! eye roll!] ”old politics”? The hard core, real politik truth of it all?

JUAN GONZALEZ: I wanted to ask you specifically about this whole question of the increase in troops, because when I asked Samantha Power, as his foreign policy adviser, about this issue, she talked about the US military being stretched and the need for even in peacekeeping to have what she called “boots on the ground” and that weren’t sufficient. But the reality is obviously that there are many American troops in other parts of the world, like South Korea, like Japan, like, to some degree, Europe, that are not being—not—doing nothing else except occupying those countries, and they could be redeployed if the Army needed more troops.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. I mean, what that indicates, I think, is that Obama is going to have an interventionist, expansionist foreign policy. I mean, that certainly was the policy of the Clinton administration. I mean, in fairness, though, Barack Obama, more than Hillary Clinton and certainly more than John McCain, who’s talking about having troops in Iraq for a hundred years, Obama is talking about trying to increase the UN presence in Iraq. He’s trying to bring in regional countries. I mean, he has a pretty serious diplomatic plan for Iraq. The problem is that it doesn’t cancel out his military plan.

On the case of the increase in troops, what Obama’s people told me is that we need these 90,000 troops desperately, because our troops need a rest. Some of them are serving three, four tours over in Iraq, and so we need to get them in there. But the reality is, you don’t get 90,000 troops and then be able to deploy them overnight. So, clearly, they’re thinking about this for years and years to come. I think the reality is that neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton are actually going to be in the business of permanently ending the US occupation of Iraq. That’s a deadly serious issue, and it needs to be front and center on this campaign.

GOOD LUCK! Countries want out of Afghanistan. Meanwhile we are bitching that countries serving in Afghanistan with different rules of engagement [no combat] are not really doing their part. This cute idea that countries will “help” us with Iraq (I laughed out loud at Samantha, on last week with Charlie Rose, chiding the Europeans for “not caring about the fate of the Iraqis”… Christ on a bayonet!, does the bitch for war HEAR herself?) is just campaign blither/come hither. They, all those countries we think should join us, did not want to assist a possible Kerry as president with the same baseless (in reality) come hither, shoveled out to the American people.

Poor America, always the victim: No one wants to help us, in our greatness, our goodness, our bounty that we offer freely to the world.

Is that the ultimate whine or what! Because you know it’s coming down the pike, in a couple of years…. No matter which politics is operational, old, new or just plain old / new bullshite.

LONDON (AFP) – Prince Harry, who has been fighting the Taliban on the front line in Afghanistan, admitted in an interview released Thursday that he sometimes wishes he was not a privileged, well-known royal.

On the other hand, he’s probably got a big bullseye on his forehead so I guess he might be a little nervous.

Why are people walking on eggshells like this? It’s downright undemocratic and ought to be embarrassing for anyone who considers themself to be a free-thinking political critic.

[Before accusing me of attacking Obama or being a shill for Hillary or having some kind of nefarious motivation, please bear in mind that Obama is now the frontrunner; we all have a vested interest in challenging the Democratic frontrunner on weak points, especially now, before the general election, when the GOP will start doing it—and going after him much harder than I ever will.]

The attacks by Obama supporters who have their pitchforks out for anyone who criticizes His Obamaness are stifling open debate and subverting true democracy. The so-called “marketplace of ideas” has become an exclusive, segregated boutique with a members-only policy that reeks of the highest form of elitism and exclusivity.

I posted that comment as a diary at pff. I’m sick and tired of seeing that attitude. And I’m sick and tired of having to concern myself with offending Obama’s supporters. If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. It smacks of being in an abusive relationship.

WFB was a reactionary that elite liberals loved. The New York Times’ multimedia tribute to him is not surprising, glossing over Buckley’s less attractive stances in his long public career. But that was Buckley’s true talent: making reprehensible opinions palatable to liberal tastes. He was much smoother than Ann Coulter, but not that different in ideological outlook. Coulter crashes into rooms, yelling, spitting bile in all directions. WFB slid in almost silently, his bouncing eyebrows the sole evidence of his presence — until he spoke, that is — and even then, bullshit oozed from his mouth in polysyllabic strips, with liberals like John Kenneth Galbraith and Murray Kempton eagerly lapping up his crap.

For all of Buckley’s social charms, augmented by his harpsichord playing, let’s recall that he and his money-losing magazine National Review opposed civil rights for African-Americans while backing white Southern statist repression in the 1950s and early ’60s. Buckley himself openly questioned the logic of giving blacks the vote at all, hinting that “chaos” might ensue if the darker hordes voted in a bloc. WFB was also a dedicated McCarthyite, “a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks,” and despite what his apologists now say, he defended the nuts in the John Birch Society as “some of the most morally energetic self-sacrificing and dedicated anti-Communists in America,” and wrote for the American Mercury when it was an anti-Semitic rag.

Ever the careerist, Buckley wised up in time, ditching the Jew-haters on his wing in order to enjoy wider acceptance in the mainstream media. If Buckley continued to believe that Jews were behind international communism, he was savvy enough not to say so once his celebrity status rose.

Ugh … I feel guilty for all of the focus on the odious scumbag who died.

So I want to say that I’ve enjoyed Buddy Miles work for years, as a young high school drummer who seldom practiced, he was one of the guys who it was fun to try to keep up with on my set while the album played.

Ann Wright, co-author of “Dissent,” talks about the government insiders and military personnel who spoke out against the invasion of Iraq. She is joined by Daniel Ellsberg, who wrote the introduction to the book. This event was hosted by Cody’s Books in Berkeley, California.

About the Author

Ann Wright served with the U.S. Army for 13 years and with the Army Reserves for 16 years, eventually retiring as a colonel. Following that, she served with the Foreign Service from 1987 to 2003, including a stint in Afghanistan where she helped reopen the U.S. embassy after the 2001 invasion.

Twenty-something Valerie Allen was the first person on line – at 11 a.m. – for the speech by Senator Obama that began at 9:30 p.m. last night. “I’m ready for a change,” said the Texas State University sociology major. “I’ve been talking up Obama for a year. This is about getting the vote out.”

“Change Washington,” echoed Miguel Arrendondo, another student here, farther back and around the corner of the Strahan Coliseum, who had been on line with his buddies since 5 p.m. “Start over.”

America, the kids want to click reset.

Enough with the big rallies already? Some make it sound as if to get tens of thousands of people assembled (the San Marcos police estimated the crowd at 12,000 people last night, The Field – experienced at such measurements – estimates 25,000) is merely a matter of saying you’ll be there and waiting for them to show up.

In fact, it’s all about organization, and investment of money, too, to pull off a mega-event like last night’s without problem.

Appearances by national political candidates are potentially spectacular events. They’re pitched not just at those that attend, but especially to those that don’t. By going to San Marcos – a town not visited by a presidential candidate since 1992 when Bill Clinton, traveling between Austin and San Antonio, stepped off his campaign bus for only a few minutes to wave at supporters along Route 35 – the Obama campaign hit many birds yesterday with one meticulously organized stone.

The street alongside the event featured a stationary convoy of eight live local TV satellite antenna trucks from two media markets: San Antonio and Austin. By holding the event between the two cities, in a small town, rather than focusing just on one big city, the Obama campaign guaranteed live feeds during the 10 p.m. evening news in both markets: a two-fer. But when you play with live TV you need to especially make sure that nothing goes awry during those moments.

So there was a stage erected, two risers for the press cameras – video and still – plus scores of rented “porto-potties” placed at distinct corners of the campus, tents set up at the security checkpoints and backstage in case of rain, temporary barriers to direct and hold the crowd (and to keep folks from falling into the San Marcos river that ran through the rally site), a Texas-sized sound system to boom the candidate’s words thousands of feet, klieg lights raised high up into the sky so that the speakers – and the crowd – could be photographed and seen at night, and a fenced-off press section alongside the stage with tables and electric power lines set up for their computers, the first three rows of ten reserved for the national press corps traveling with the candidate… The Field estimates that these things alone cost between $50,000 and $100,000 to pull off.

The Field perked its little virgin ears up when a staffer for one of the companies providing these services, coming off a cell phone call, could be overheard telling a colleague, “the Clinton campaign is scrambling. They want to do a big event in Austin!” Yes, these companies work for competing campaigns. Rock concerts aren’t ad hoc matters.

He’s a hack and a fraud and another warmonger, but he does seem to have a staff that’s pretty good at setting up rock concerts campaign events.

He introduces Obama who comes jogging onto the stage at 9:35 p.m. with a country fiddle tune blasting as audial backdrop. The valley becomes a wall of flashing cell phone cameras and screams. “Y’all do it big in Texas,” he grins. He’s got ‘em all lassoed. You can see a good video of much of what we’ve just shared with you, done by the Austin-American-Statesman at this link.

At 10 p.m. plus 30 seconds, I say to Conroy, “here comes whatever the campaign wanted said on live TV,” and, sure enough, Obama launches into a blistering and humorous response to John McCain over Al Qaida in Iraq. “I heard this morning that Senator McCain had some news for me,” the candidate boomed. “Well I’ve got some news for John McCain… Al Qaida wasn’t in Iraq until you followed George W. Bush there… That’s the news, John McCain.”

And that’s the clip that I’ve seen five times already this morning on CNN.

I read yesterday that provincial elections take place in Iraq in OCTOBER. And, I think in April, Petraeus is to testify again. Low flying fog of war will commence again. The WH will be assisting McCain, Bush being as much a maverick as the AZ asshole.

Should be entertaining. obama needs to get it off Iraq and to where McCain is not, or at least less, comfortable.

As unusual as Lander’s site is, it is also part of a sociological trend among whites who live in increasingly non-Anglo cities and regions: their transformation into a minority group. Whites used to think of themselves as standard-issue American — they had the luxury of not having to grapple with the significance of their own racial background; they were “us” and everyone else was “ethnic.” Not anymore.

“Demographic shifts have put a new kind of pressure on that category of people who were once just considered the norm,” says Mike Hill, author of “After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority.” “White identity is becoming particularized and minoritized. No longer the normative category, it’s becoming one of many identities.”

This pressure naturally leads to a greater sense of self-consciousness as the new minority begins to negotiate their relationships with members of other minorities (everyone else).

Still, Lander is less concerned with cross-ethnic and racial relations than he is with how whites treat each other. As a onetime graduate student in the Midwest, he got tired of coastal condescension of the fly-over states and the glib assumption that “red staters are evil and stupid.”

“Too many white people don’t like to be reminded that they’re white. They like to think that white people are those evil corporate right-wingers or the uneducated masses who vote the wrong way. But ‘enlightened whites’ are white people too and have just as much of a group mentality as they think the red staters have.”

Still, Lander doesn’t want you to think he’s angry or taking himself too seriously. “First and foremost, it’s satire; it’s funny,” he says. “I’m trying to make people laugh.”

But he’s doing so in a brave new world in which we’re all becoming minorities, and nobody’s really sure who’s going to have the last laugh.

After a lengthy investigation and rigorous fact checking, Rothschild authored a piece entitled: The FBI Deputizes Business, the March cover story.

Writes Rothschild:

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law. InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm.

During a period in American history unsurpassed in secrecy, political vindictiveness, corruption and erosion of civil liberties, I recommend giving Rothschild’s piece a good read.

…By going to San Marcos – a town not visited by a presidential candidate since 1992 when Bill Clinton, traveling between Austin and San Antonio, stepped off his campaign bus for only a few minutes to wave at supporters along Route 35…

[D]uring the Reagan years when the Democratic party propped up a presidency reminiscent of its current antics in the George W. Bush years, the Democratic party elites bestowed upon themselves five hundred and fifty “super-delegates.” They announced it was imperative to alter the rules to “make it easier for the party to consolidate around front-running candidates.” Meaning that it would make it a lot easier for party leaders and the party’s money backers to rally around the candidate of their choice putting all the resources of the party behind him, to beat out insurgents and foist the guy they owned onto the voting public.

The surprise ascendancy of Barack Obama, interestingly backed by the old Carter hand Brzezinski along with numerous financial backers, has him facing competition from another party insider, Hillary Clinton, along with her own big money people. The super-delegates are finding themselves in the position of having to pick one or the other candidate in what might be an internecine falling out among thieves which only aggrandizes their own power within the party as the two candidates are made supplicants for their votes while promising them rewards.

Maybe the super-delegates is one of the reasons Barack Obama talks so much about hope. But he seemed to know early on to cover his bets. Hope may be good enough for the people but not enough for a contender. His contributions to the campaign chests of the super-delegates themselves has been substantial the past two years. Even more so than his opponent who might be doing some hoping herself lately.

Currently, enthusiastic Democratic voters are reduced to observers “hoping” that the super-delegates “do the right thing” and not “thwart the will of the people.” That the super-delegates were put into place precisely to thwart them might be a bit of old history they don’t care to think about at the moment. Why put a damper on hope when it’s the only thing you’ve got.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Two human rights experts for the United Nations on Thursday criticized a federal plan to raze public housing projects in New Orleans, saying it will force the predominantly black residents into homelessness.

New Orleans advocates clamoring to save 4,500 public housing units claimed a victory. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which wants to replace the decades-old housing projects with mixed-income, mixed-use development, called the U.N. experts “misinformed.”

The statement issued out of Geneva was not a U.N. finding, but only the individual views of Miloon Kothari, a special investigator on housing matters for the U.N. Human Rights Council, and Gay McDougall, a lawyer who is an expert on minority and rights issues.

They charged that demolition would harm thousands of people by denying them a place to live in a city where housing already is scarce since Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005.

“The authorities claim that the demolition of public housing is not intentionally discriminatory,” Kothari and McDougall said, but the “predominantly African-American residents” will be denied their “internationally recognized human rights” to a home.

They commented a day before a U.N. racism panel planned to discuss Katrina recovery efforts and public housing in New Orleans and also was expected to comment on allegations of racial discrimination in the United States. Neither expert was involved with that committee’s hearings.

The Pew survey also found Americans are increasingly optimistic about progress in Iraq and 47 percent now favor keeping U.S. troops there until the situation is stable. Pew found that was the highest percentage support in more than a year. Obama and Clinton are proposing withdrawing troops while McCain is not.

Re the “Things White People Like” – I’m surprised it took someone this long to point out all these things and to “ethnographize” the progressive, college-educated, white-collar American… who DO have an annoying tendency to ethnographize everyone else (and I’m noticing it happen more now during the Obama-Clinton race, where blue-collar Dems are constantly being described as some sort of exotic minority with quaint customs).

All you do to win Raimondo’s heart is piss off the lobby at one time or another. But say nice things about Israel and he’s like a high school nerd looking at the girl he’s crushing on go off with the quarterback. Thus Justin’s off again on again thing with Obama.

p.s. I think it’s okay (if stupid) for companies to bar access to certain websites. But when done so, it should be uniformly applied. So if the decision is made to bar access to blogs because they are productivity zappers, that’s cool, but then block ALL blogs, not just the ones which are politically distasteful to whatever shlub is blacklisting sites.

But I doubt that he’ll be chastised by the sheep and told “It’s their company and they can do what they want. DK is just a guest who’s not been invited. Fidelity has to moderate the community. If DK was banned, it was probably for something Kos said. Read the FAQ and STFU. Oh, and here’s photo of a cat doing something stupid.”

I guess the street is saying, yet again, that rate cuts and Bernanke does not do it.

What a shock!!

***************

cad

so Fidelity selected Dkos to block? I know some places block all blogs (tho things being what they are, inevitably some get thru)…. and while I prefer people having free access and just doing things in moderation, I can see why places block blogs.

Plus I think a lot of people don’t know the technology that allows monitoring of work place key strokes and whatever is up on the screen….

What a tool kos is. The company said, “Areas of concern would include profanity,”. Well, hello?? But kos claims is some sort of partisan witchhunt, even generalizing by saying that “all” conservative blogs are accessible. How does he know that? There are millions of them. But who needs facts when you have outrage?

I’m sure other areas of concern include the obsessive manner in which their employees will spend hours and hours at Orange Kosolini hurling insults and zero ratings at each other. In the cases of Armando and Melrath (and those two really ought to open a law practice together!), a business could be prosecuted for billing clients for time allegedly spent working for them but in reality spent clogging up the blogosphere with idiotic posts.

A couple of weeks ago when Tom Lantos died, I mentioned that there were certain aspects of the story of his life in Hitler’s Europe that didn’t sound likely to me, and that if you’re so inclined, it’s very easy to lie about that and get away with it largely because people are very reticent to say anything that might be construed as negative about those who were presecuted during those years and survived. Jerzy Kosinski told a number of whoppers about his life during the Nazi occupation of Poland, and published a book he not so subtly claimed was a “memoir” that turned out to be a fantasy, and IMHO a rather sick one at that considering the relative comfort in which he lived during that awful time (the sainted Elie Weisel also has some very dubious passages in his writings on those years). Now we have the following case that I just came across:

A Belgian writer has admitted that she made up her best-selling “memoir” depicting how, as a Jewish child, she lived with a pack of wolves in the woods during the Holocaust, her lawyers said Friday.

Misha Defonseca’s book, “Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years,” was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France.

Her two Brussels-based lawyers, siblings Nathalie and Marc Uyttendaele, said the author acknowledged her story was not autobiographical and that she did not trek 1,900 miles as a child across Europe with a pack of wolves in search of her deported parents during World War II.

Defonseca wrote in her book that Nazis seized her parents when she was a child, forcing her to wander the forests and villages of Europe alone for four years. She claimed she found herself trapped in the Warsaw ghetto, killed a Nazi soldier in self-defense and was adopted by a pack of wolves that protected her.[Apparently, she left out the part where she founded Rome. — JJB]

In the statement, Defonseca acknowledged the story she wrote was a fantasy and that she never fled her home in Brussels during the war to find her parents.

Defonseca says her real name is Monique De Wael and that her parents were arrested and killed by Nazis as Belgian resistance fighters, the statement said.

“This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving,” the statement said.

“I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed. I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost,” the statement said. [This rationalization sounds exactly like similar ones issued in defense of Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird.” It must come from a template document called “What To Say When It Turns Out You Spent The Halocaust Living At Home With Relatives And Not In Auschwitz.” Or maybe “Holocaust Non-Denial Denials For People With Overactive Imaginations.” — JJB]

[snip]

Pressure on the author to defend the accuracy of her book had grown in recent weeks.

“I’m not an expert on relations between humans and wolves but I am a specialist of the persecution of Jews and they (Defonseca’s family) can’t be found in the archives,” Belgian historian Maxime Steinberg told RTL television. “The De Wael family is not Jewish nor were they registered as Jewish.”

Defonseca had been asked to write the book by U.S. publisher Jane Daniel in the 1990s, after Daniel heard the writer tell the story in a Massachusetts synagogue.

Daniel and Defonseca fell out over profits received from the best-selling book, which led to a lawsuit. In 2005, a Boston court ordered Daniel to pay Defonseca and her ghost writer Vera Lee $22.5 million.

Lee, of Newton, Mass., said she was shocked to hear Defonseca made up the story.

“She always maintained that this was truth as she recalled it, and I trusted that that was the case,” Lee said.

Defonseca’s lawyers said Daniel has not yet paid the court-ordered sum.

Daniel said Friday she would try to get the judgment overturned. She said she could not fully research Defonseca’s story before it was published because the woman claimed she did not know her parents’ names, her birthday or where she was born.

“There was nothing to go on to research,” she said.

So we’re to believe that no one thought it unlikely that a small child wandered all over occupied Europe (which was really a huge prison camp in those awful times, with varying degrees of security and oppression exerted over residents of different areas) and survived in the forests (what did she do during winter?) thanks to a herd of wolves while war raged back and forth, and people without ID papers were sent off to certain death.

I really don’t know what to say about that, except that this woman needs to be on psychotropic drugs, and that she, the ghostwriter, and the publisher should be denied access to any money derived from the sale of this obnoxious, obscene piece of kitsch.

Kosinski was exposed as both a liar, and as having not written his own books. He also stole the plot of “Being There” from a book that was very popular in Poland in the 1930s. He was probably some kind of spook, and his publishers connived in providing cover for him. They had a lot of help from some very powerful people at the NY Times, including Abe Rosenthal (who apparently used to go around to S&M clubs with Kosinski), and Arthur and Barbara Gelb, who were in charge of the Arts and Leisure section and the Sunday magazine. The book said to be about his life during the Holocaust is all made up. His parents managed to get forged ID papers, (the name Kosinski is an alias, a common non-Jewish Polish name), and they got out of Lodz and lived a fairly comfortable life all things considered in a town in the hinterlands, where they were protected by some non-Jewish Poles who took extraordinary risks to shield them (people who knew they were Jews, incidentally). It was the anger of a number of these people that eventually led to the truth, BTW. It took a long time for their complaints against Kosinski to be heard in those pre-Internet days, but they did eventually surface.

Did not know that stuff about Kosinski. The Painted Bird was one of those novels I tried, but couldn’t get through. And hell, I read tons of Cynthia Ozick, who, long ago was described by Spy magazine as “author of novels nobody ever reads”

just please cite where I claimed you (0.00 / 0)
supported Hillary Clinton. And if I am wrong, I will write one of those huge diary apologies.
by Miss Devore @ Fri Feb 29, 2008 at 13:32:15 PM PST
[ Parent | Respond to this Idiocy ]

I have better things to do (0.00 / 0)
Go reread your posts attacking me at mcat’s since you seem to have forgotten.
by catnip @ Fri Feb 29, 2008 at 13:40:15 PM PST
[ Parent | Respond to this Idiocy | ]

I realize you have better things to do. (0.00 / 0)
There are thousands of baseless accusations to make.

umm…no (0.00 / 0)
I’m actually researching 2 stories: one about Afghan prisoners being handed over for possible torture again and the other about a major political bribery scandal here in Canada while taking time out from both of them to actually have some fun as well.

And yes, I consider those to be “better things to do” than to sit here and watch you insult me – again.

Markos should be concerned about a corp blocking traffic to cubicleworld.

heck, imagine if that caught on. half the fekking do-nothing donk hack lawyers on the planet log into kos from work and i bet 90% of his non ward-heeler users (((all 2000 of them!))) do so as well. just look at all those midday time stamps. his revenue would sink like a stone.

WASHINGTON — Despite the rhetoric of the Democratic presidential candidates, significant numbers of U.S. troops will remain in Iraq regardless who wins in November.

In their final push to win the nomination, Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Clinton of New York are repeating their vow to start withdrawing U.S. forces shortly after taking office. But both candidates draw a distinction between “combat” troops, whom they want to withdraw, and “noncombat” troops, who will stay to battle terrorists, protect the U.S. civilian presence and possibly train and mentor Iraqi security forces.

Conducting such missions would likely require the sustained deployment of tens of thousands of American military personnel, foreign-policy advisers from both campaigns acknowledge.

“No one is talking about getting to zero,” said a foreign-policy adviser to Sen. Obama.

The upshot: When voters go to the polls in November, they will face a stark choice about the future direction of the Iraq war, but they won’t be able bring American involvement to a quick end.

California State University East Bay has fired a math teacher after six weeks on the job because she inserted the word “nonviolently” in her state-required Oath of Allegiance form.

Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker and graduate student who began teaching remedial math to undergrads Jan. 7, lost her $700-a-month part-time job after refusing to sign an 87-word Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution that the state requires of elected officials and public employees.

“I don’t think it was fair at all,” said Kearney-Brown. “All they care about is my name on an unaltered loyalty oath. They don’t care if I meant it, and it didn’t seem connected to the spirit of the oath. Nothing else mattered. My teaching didn’t matter. Nothing.”

A veteran public school math teacher who specializes in helping struggling students, Kearney-Brown, 50, had signed the oath before – but had modified it each time.

She signed the oath 15 years ago, when she taught eighth-grade math in Sonoma. And she signed it again when she began a 12-year stint in Vallejo high schools.

Each time, when asked to “swear (or affirm)” that she would “support and defend” the U.S. and state Constitutions “against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Kearney-Brown inserted revisions: She wrote “nonviolently” in front of the word “support,” crossed out “swear,” and circled “affirm.” All were to conform with her Quaker beliefs, she said.

The school districts always accepted her modifications, Kearney-Brown said.

But Cal State East Bay wouldn’t, and she was fired on Thursday.

Modifying the oath “is very clearly not permissible,” the university’s attorney, Eunice Chan, said, citing various laws. “It’s an unfortunate situation. If she’d just signed the oath, the campus would have been more than willing to continue her employment.”

Modifying oaths is open to different legal interpretations. Without commenting on the specific situation, a spokesman for state Attorney General Jerry Brown said that “as a general matter, oaths may be modified to conform with individual values.” For example, court oaths may be modified so that atheists don’t have to refer to a deity, said spokesman Gareth Lacy.

Kearney-Brown said she could not sign an oath that, to her, suggested she was agreeing to take up arms in defense of the country.

“I honor the Constitution, and I support the Constitution,” she said. “But I want it on record that I defend it nonviolently.”

If you’re the Clinton campaign, Senator Jay Rockefeller’s endorsement today of Obama has got to hurt on multiple levels.

His state of West Virginia was likely to be one of the next illusory “firewalls” claimed by Clinton if she survived March 4.

He’s now the 15th US Senate Democrat to endorse Obama, who started out the year with exactly one endorsement (that of his Illinois colleague Dick Durbin) and now has more support from the chamber than Clinton (who has the backing of 12 Senate Democrats).

Bill Moyers talks with historian Nell Irvin Painter about the Gilded Age of the late 19th century — and what some contend is the second Gilded Age of today. In the 19th century discrepancies in income and power fostered the Populist Movement. Today, “populism” has become a watchword in the campaign — with both positive and negative connotations.

In her conversation Nell Painter talks about populism then and now — and how the image it suggests is more often than not, off the mark:

It sounds as if people who are throwing “populism” around are throwing it around as a dirty word. And if it is a dirty word, they don’t know what they’re talking about. I think they think it’s a dirty word, because it pits Americans against each other, as if we would all be hand in hand if it weren’t for populist agitators….They’re probably talking in very veiled terms about class issues. Class is the dirty little secret in the United States.

where blue-collar Dems are constantly being described as some sort of exotic minority with quaint customs

The first time my liberal WASP ex girlfriend visited my parents’ house and saw Wonder Bread in the kitchen and a TV running in every room she pulled out a notebook and started writing a grant proposal. The idea that people ate out of little plastic trays you stuck in the microwave filled her with horror and curiosity. A walk through the neighborhood replete with Virgin Mary statues, American and MIA flags, and houses too close together left her wondering if she was going to make it out alive. The world of Homo White Ethnicus New Jerseyicus is a curious world indeed.

sometimes, when I watch the adoration and leap of faith that people have in Obama’s candidacy, I feel like I’m watching a younger version of the old and sick people at a faith healer’s revival meeting.

But to make this observation is not an endorsement of Obama’s candidacy, nor a call for “lesser evilism.” It’s simply a statement of fact. As we’ve said here before, echoing Noam Chomsky, even small mitigations in the operation of vast power structures can translate into benefits – or alleviations of suffering – for substantial numbers of people. Again, this is an observable fact, not a value judgment. Whether these mitigations of injustice and suffering in certain instances outweigh the cost of participating in – and thereby to some extent legitimizing and perpetuating – a system that inevitably produces injustice and suffering on a massive scale is a question that each person must decide for themselves, in their own individual conscience.

And this question is certainly pertinent in the case of Barack Obama. For by the choices he has made in picking advisers to help him shape his policies, he has given every indication that while his presidency might represent a better management and presentation of the current system, it will in no way overturn or even seriously challenge it on any essential point. In other words – and bearing in mind the type of not-insubstantial mitigations noted above – he will keep doing what Bush has been doing, only more competently, less radically, with a greater care for the long-term viability of the power structure. And what is that structure that Obama seeks to refine and extend? It is an imperial system based on militarism and the exaltation of elitist profit and privilege above all other concerns.

(It should be noted that this profit/privilege motive is not always elevated to the exclusion of all other concerns – civil rights, health care, disaster relief, education, et al. There are horrors enough in this system without having to pretend that it is operated at all levels and at all times by inhuman monsters. In fact it is, like every system of power, all too human; it partakes of the same chaos, contradiction, selfishness, ignorance, and bestial impulses that afflict us all. Yet because the system is made up of human beings, it also contains traces of the empathy, awareness and striving for transcendence that flicker inside us from time to time. But however much these higher concerns might occasionally animate various individuals – or even larger factions – within the system, they are always, in the end, subordinated to the pursuit of elitist aggrandizement. Measures that attempt to address these other concerns are not allowed to hinder elitist profit and privilege in any serious way; indeed, these reforms are often designed – or forcibly perverted – in such a way as to make them serve this rapacious, relentless pursuit.)

We know that one of Obama’s principal foreign policy advisers is Zbigniew Brzezinski, an incorrigible Great Gamester and one of the unsung architects of the modern world. It was Brzezinski who, as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, devised the strategy of arming and funding violent Islamic extremists in order to destabilize Afghanistan and bait the Soviets into a military intervention to bolster their client regime in Kabul. Brzezinski can thus lay claim to being one of the fathers of the global jihad that has spawned – and been used to justify — so much death and suffering….and so much profitable permanent war. We know that Obama has called for the American military to be even larger and more powerful, more ready to strike anywhere in the world with overwhelming force whenever the nation’s “interests” – defined solely by the elite – are “threatened.” We know that his plan for “withdrawing” from Iraq involves leaving an undetermined number of troops in the conquered land, carrying out the same “missions” which they are supposedly conducting now: training Iraqi security forces, fighting terrorism, protecting American assets and personnel, bringing “stability to the region,” etc. And as Jeremy Scahill points out, Obama’s plans could also lead to an increase in the number of private contractors – mercenaries – in Iraq. Obama has refused to support legislation banning the use of these volatile hired guns in war zones.

In all of this we can see that Obama is a “safe pair of hands” for the militarism that underpins the never-ending quest for America’s “full spectrum dominance” over world affairs. The “hope” for genuine change in this regard is a tragic illusion, a hope projected onto, not embodied by Obama.

Of course the WASP species is even more curious. Cutesy names for mixed drinks, strangely embalmed yet still curiously alive old ladies you have to be nice to, odd, inarticulate, emotionally stunted cousins who have graduated from Ivy League colleges but can’t quite speak the English language (see also GW Bush), the inability to determine who’s drunk and who’s just flat out weird, it makes one long for Wonder Bread and MIA flags.

One of the people who wrote Kosinski’s “novels” was Paul Auster. He was a student at either Yale or Harvard, and he and his then-girlfriend wrote substantial portions of Cockpit (IIRC), with Kosinski dropping by to give them general plot points and the like (the books were collaborations between small teams of writers who never met, aside from the occasional pairs like Auster and his girlfriend). He tried to seduce the young woman on several occasions when he met with her one on one, if you can call telling someone “have sex with me right now and I can advance you’re career” seduction. I once knew a late-30-something woman who had a much younger female friend who was Kosinski’s mistress for a year or two. She got to tag along on a dinner date that included Kosinski, his wife, and the young woman, in addition to my friend. Mistress and wife got along splendidly, the wife apparently took her under her wing, bought her clothes, told her how to keep Jerzy happy. This was after Kosinski’s outing as a fraud, probably 1985. All in all, a very weird thing. Even today, anyone speaking the truth about him is liable to be viciously attacked.

Allen Ginsberg was another frequent guest on Buckley’s program who helped him sell his line of crap. Oddly, one of the only people to call him on his pompous self-promoting was Jack Kerouac, who agreed with him politically. When JK appeared on “Firing Line” in late 1968, at the end of the show, Buckley tried one of his neologisms in asking a question about the hippies’ “Adamite” approach to life (I guess the word “prelapsarian” wasn’t good enough for him). Kerouac, who’d been acting like a drunken lunatic for much of the program, suddenly looked cold sober as he fixed Buckley with a stare that could have burned through a steel vault and said “Adamite?????” with such incredulous, “are you kidding me??!!!” contempt the audience ended up laughing at Buckley. It’s featured in a documentary film about Kerouac entitled (I think) “What Really Happened to Kerouac.”

An Israeli minister today warned of increasingly bitter conflict in the Gaza Strip, saying the Palestinians could bring on themselves what he called a “holocaust”.

“The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves,” Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defence minister, told army radio.

Shoah is the Hebrew word normally reserved to refer to the Jewish Holocaust. It is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi extermination of Jews during the second world war, and many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other events.

“It will be sad, and difficult, but we have no other choice,” Vilnai said, referring to the large-scale military operation he said Israel was preparing to bring a halt to the rocket fire.

“We’re getting close to using our full strength. Until now, we’ve used a small percentage of the army’s power because of the nature of the territory.”

Israel would not launch a ground offensive in the next week or two, partly because the military would prefer to wait for better weather, defence sources said. But the army had completed its preparations and was awaiting the government’s order to move, officials said.

Everytime the Israelis ramp up to a new overreaction I just think “Sand Creek” and “Wounded Knee”. Maybe I shouldn’t, but Gaza and the West Bank, and the horrible destruction of civilian life in response to the desperate resistance to occupation by a small number of young men remind me so much of the Indian Wars here.

There is one particular song on there that really, really resonates with me. Here’s why (warning, roundabout story from an aging man) …

When I was young, I became a music fanatic, at a very young age. I had a little GE transister 9volt radio, black w/ silver “chrome” highlights, that I carried everywhere. I’m talking 6, 7 years old. Anyway, I fell in love with LOTS of different stuff … the album rock AM radio station I could pick up in Iowa played Motown and Zeppelin and so much else. In fact, my dad worked nights there. He would bring me old played-out 45s that they couldn’t use anymore.

One of the guys I fell in love with was Elton John. I just adored Elton John, and when I was older and had earned enough allowance to go to Western Auto to buy an album, I really wanted “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, but they were sold out. Impulsively, I bought “Tumbleweed Connection”, which had “Tiny Dancer” on it. Only song on it I knew.

There is a haunting song on the second side … “Talking Old Soldier”, an arresting piece. I loved the way Elton John and Bernie Taupin told these stories about people … not just drugs and sex and rock-and-roll, but actual STORIES. About people.

Anyway, Bettye has had a bit of a comeback doing covers of unlikely songs, (not unlike Johnny Cash’s last couple of albums), and her latest has an incredible cover of that obscure John/Taupin song.

and actually, “Madman Across the Water” had “Tiny Dancer” on it, so I wasn’t even getting something I knew. Closest thing to a hit on that album was “Burn Down the Mission”. The NEXT two albums I bought were “Goodby Yellow Brick Road” and “Madman Across the Water”, which is way more than you care to know, anyway.

As literary brawls go, I prefer Vidal’s bout with Norman Mailer, who was completely outmatched. After a drunken Mailer attacked him at a party (either throwing a drink in his face or punching him -descripions differ) Vidal said “Once again, words fail Norman.”

Buckley, and his hate and bigotry, and his call for tattoos on AIDS patients (and yes, lucid, I have suspicions about the official line, too), but I think about people we lost, through ignorance and gov’t innaction, and it depresses the shit out of me.

tumbleweed connection is my favorite elton john album. not that i am much of a fan of his, its the only one i own apart from a MMatW cd. i used to work with this old punkster, mid 80s, and he culled a large portion of his album collection because he’d decided it dated him, or something. i bought more than a few of his albums for a buck or two a pop, all circa 196/early 70s. he was an absolute fanatic about record cleanliness and the one elton john album i got from him was tumbleweed connection.

im still laughing at him, all the way to the turntable! my copy of tc is, i assume, approx 38 years old, and still clean as a whistle.

theres something about the way he voices the piano chords, some type of open, clean 4ths and 5ths feeling i really like. plus the lyrics of course.

Hey Madman, I had one of those little transistor radios too. I don’t remember the make or model but it was about 4 x 6 inches – I guess shaped to go into a good-sized pocket.

I was about 10 before I got into listening to the radio (my own radio, as opposed to my parents’, which was always tuned to the local classical music station). It had a earplug, like an oldfashioned hearing aid – shove it right into your ear.

It’s hard to describe to younger people how massive a presence Elton John was in the ’70s. And now he’s fallen off the map.

Barack Obama does not necessarily have in mind Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he says he will meet with Iran’s leaders, a top Jewish proxy says.

“Ahmadinejad may not be the one to meet with,” U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, the top Jewish surrogate for the contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, told JTA in a recent interview. “He is not the person that ultimately controls power in Iran.”

In debates, the U.S. senator for Illinois has said he will meet with the leaders of rogue nations such as Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela in his first year in office, a repudiation of what Obama says is the failed Bush administration policy of isolating such regimes.

So, I assume that means that he didn’t mean he’d meet with Kim Jong Il, Assad, Castro or Chavez either – just some other generic “leaders”.

Johndroe sidestepped questions about comments from Lebanese Premier Fouad Siniora, who said Friday that his government did not ask Washington to send warships to the area.

[…WH double talk]

Siniora, whose government is backed by the West and most Arab countries, had stressed earlier during a meeting with Arab ambassadors that Beirut did not ask for the warships and had summoned a top US diplomat for “clarifications.”

“We did not ask anyone to send warships,” Siniora said, adding that no US warship was in “Lebanese waters.”
[…]
Meanwhile, a media officer for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, Neeraj Singh, said on Friday that UNIFIL forces had not been informed of the United States’ sudden move.

This evening I caught a glimpse of Baba Wawa (who has had some nasty plastic surgery, apparently involving cheekbone implants) doing a special on the Brit Royal Family. She burbled something about how HARD they work.

I agree with Ringo – they should all take a vacation and never come back.

well I went and looked at HuffPuffPo… Abdullah, someone reposted his address to the Woodrwo Wilson Center. Think it was Vidal who called the leadership there, Abdullah and Raina… “the operetta”, seems appropriate.

As for Ringo… iirc he gratefully accepted the OBE (think that is the Order they were inducted into, for making mucho cash for the UK) from ERex… it was Lennon who declined it.

I think it is best when people DON”T show up for awards/rewards of that sort.

Certainly trainloads of suck ups should have declined the Medal of Honor these years from Bush. But no, they sucked right on to that stage, in the midst of racist foreign war. Some of them even shared the stage with the war makers, Tenet, Bremer, Myers and so on.

As no official provision exists for renouncing an honour, any such act is always unofficial, and the record of the award in The London Gazette stands. However the physical badge can be returned to the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood — though even this act is purely symbolic, as a replacement badge may be purchased for a nominal sum. Any recipient can also request that the honour not be used officially…

:::snip:::

John Lennon, musician (returned MBE in 1969 “in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Biafran (Nigerian Civil) War, and its support of America in Vietnam”).

So.

Former University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing has been released on a $1 million bail after pleading not guilty to the murder of Sam DuBose. Tensing, who is white, fatally shot the 43-year-old African-American man on July 19 after stopping him for not having a front license plate. Two additional officers, Phillip Kidd and David Lindenschmidt, hav […]

As the Senate prepares to vote to defund Planned Parenthood, we look at the Center for Medical Progress, the anti-choice group behind the attacks on Planned Parenthood. The group was founded by David Daleiden who is seen in the undercover sting videos using a fictional name. We speak to RH Reality Check's Sharona Coutts, who wrote the piece, "Exclu […]

The Senate is planning to vote as soon as Monday to strip Planned Parenthood of $500 million in federal funding. The vote comes as Planned Parenthood is coming under fire from anti-choice activists after the release of a series of undercover sting videos were published online. The heavily edited videos suggest the organization profits from supplying aborted […]

In Portland, Oregon, law enforcement officers have removed Greenpeace activists who spent 40 hours suspended from the St. Johns Bridge in order to block an icebreaking ship commissioned by oil giant Shell from leaving for the Arctic. Hundreds of activists have been gathering on the bridge and in kayaks since Tuesday night in efforts to stop Shell's plan […]

On Reality Asserts Itself, Mr. Drake, a former Senior Executive at the National Security Agency, says he was targeted by the NSA because he exposed that the agency had intel that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks and because he blew the whistle on a massive secret surveillance program aimed at Americans

James K. Gailbraith says, IMF is demanding a substantial reduction of the Greek debt to participate in any new deal and meanwhile German law makers are refusing to approve a new bail-out without the IMF

James K. Galbraith a member of the working group advising the former finance minister Varoufakis on 'Plan B' says there were great impositions imposed on the Greek government including certain procedures that removed control from the government and placed them in the hands of creditor institutions

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House said it will launch the first ever rule on Monday to cut carbon emissions from power plants, a plan that opponents in the coal industry and their political allies will fight in the courts.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Donald Trump, the man to beat in this week's first televised Republican presidential debate, said on Sunday he does not plan to attack his rivals and downplayed expectations for his performance, saying "I'm not a debater."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. backers of the Iran nuclear deal are increasingly confident of enough Democratic support to ensure it survives review by Congress, despite fierce opposition by majority Republicans and a massive lobbying drive.

Media

from Howl

I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

October 7 1955

"a remarkable collection of angelson one stage reading their poetry"
"I think Allen Ginsberg standing up there reading - putting himself on the line - was one of the two bravest things I've ever seen. Remember, it was '55. People had crew cuts, and they looked at you like you were misplaced cannon fodder. The country was being run by Luce publications. It was a dangerous, cold, ugly time, and it was scary. . .
In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. We had gone beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision."
-Michael McClure

Democrats…

Same as goddam fucking forever.
Over and over, in election year after election year, GE and MidTerms both… the Dems start to purr and preen, they stretch luxuriously - at just being TOLD they are going to win [...]
It never fails.
... in February of 2002, looking over the already joyless congressional stragglers willing to be drafted for duty… they barely dreamed, yet, it was even possible (Howard, a different person then, had not arrived to say it could be done)… but one thing was clear, we could not rely on the party to swing it. Could not. You could smell it, they would screw the deal. And I am not talking about Howard and primary issues here. By the end, that was a passing political story. Chuck it on the heap.
[...]
Upshot? The Republicans make it thru. They hold on.